My last story is of a Creek wedding held in Last Chance Roadhouse on Hunker. It was Christmas Day. I had just come down the mountain trail from McDougal's where I had my Christmas Dinner. The wedding party was waiting for me when I arrived. The roadhouse was a low, log building about fifty feet long and twenty wide. There were no partitions. The bar was at one end, the kitchen at the other, and the part in between was a sort of "Anyman's Land." It was dining-room, parlor, and gambling room in one. The bunkhouse was separate. Things were "humming" from kitchen to bar, for remember it was Christmas at a roadhouse on a main creek trail in the Klondike in early days.

Not the most suitable place in the world for a wedding. For all that, it went through in fine style. We stood up beside the table and the place grew quiet. A blanket was hung up by the roadhouse man in front of the bar—done because of his innate sense of the fitness of things. There was no bothersome noise, except the opening and closing of the doors as people came in and went out, and the stage-whispering of a few men in the bar who had got too far along with their celebrations for their fellows to control them completely. The names of the bride and groom, their true names, were, Jensine Kolken and John Peczu Kazinsky. She was a Norwegian Lutheran, he a Hungarian Roman Catholic, married by a Canadian Presbyterian minister in a Klondike roadhouse. Rather an unusual combination but it turned out splendidly. They loved one another sincerely and all these years have lived happily. They are prosperous and have several children.

After the wedding many toasts were drunk. I drank mine in soda-water. Before the toasts Mrs. Kazinsky had gone to the kitchen and was there busy about supper. She was the roadhouse cook and had a lot of work to do preparing and serving meals to the holiday crowd. I said good-bye, put on parka and mitts, and set out on my seven mile tramp to Gold Bottom, where we had arranged a Camp Christmas Tree Entertainment for that night.

It was cold, bitter cold, the roadhouse thermometer said 50 below zero, and yet it was a grand night. We had seen no sun night or day for weeks, but for all that it was clear as day with a light more beautiful than that of the sun. The whole broad, snow-white gulch around me was flooded with light. I looked up to the sky and there my eyes beheld a wondrous sight, magnificent beyond imagining. The dome of heaven, from east to west and from north to south, was filled with an iridescent misty glory, glowing with strange light in which gleamed lovely, delicate shades of green and gold. You could see this luminous mist and yet see through it as if it weren't there at all. It was almost uncanny, like seeing the invisible. In the midst of it floated the moon at the full, ablaze with abundant light, spilling it down in wasteful abundance mixed with the Aurora, coming to the silent earth to change it to a glistening, white fairy-land of unrivalled beauty. Far, far beyond in the clear depths of the cloudless sky a thousand, thousand stars sparkled intensely like well-set jewels. As I gazed the misty glory disappeared as if by magic and in its place I saw great arrows of witching light shooting in masses back and forth through the air.

I stood, as many times I did those winter nights, spellbound and reverent in the presence of God's handiwork. Fancy took wing. Perchance this fair light was from the shining pinions of angels as they flew hither and thither on heavenly errands. Perchance it was the gleaming from a myriad spears, as the armies of the Lord of Hosts marched and countermarched in some Grand Parade. Or were these the wild, elemental forces of nature playing at games that the Creator had taught them and that they had played from all eternity?

Apart from these dreamings, I know I shall never see anything, with my mortal eyes at least, so startlingly and mystically beautiful as these canvasses which God hangs out night after night in the far North for all to see who will but lift up their eyes to the heavens.

My talk was ended. Captain Ferris, my old friend, was in the chair and after the usual courtesies he brought us down to "terra firma" with a joke on the padre. "Now, Captain Pringle," he said, "those were wonderful sights you saw after you left the wedding in that roadhouse where you took only soda-water in the toasts. We know you so well that you didn't need to tell us what you took. We know you are a teetotaller. But, padre, for the sake of the strangers here, and in view of the amazing things you saw after leaving the roadhouse, say again to the crowd distinctly, that it was "only soda-water." I "said it again," we all had a good laugh, and dispersed.

V.
Wolf Dogs

I had been with the 43rd about two months and during that time we had been out in "rest" twice, once at Villers-au-bois and once at Camblin l'Abbe. They were very interesting French towns, especially to one who had always lived in western Canada, and although they had been pretty badly knocked about by shelling they were havens of refuge, rest, and comfort to us after the trenches. But my man Macpherson wouldn't grow enthusiastic with me over these two places. "Wait till you see Auchel, sir, that's the place for us. Why it's the French 'home' of the 43rd. That's a real town and fine people, and they think there's no other battalion quite as good as ours." I heard the town often spoken about in the same way by others and was delighted when I learned one day that we were to move back to Auchel. I wasn't disappointed in my expectations. The place had been a prosperous farming village until the discovery of coal nearby had developed it into a fine little town. It had retained much of its former quaintness, and the mines had brought it in contact with newer ideas by which it had benefited, and the town was vastly cleaner, better lighted, had better stores, and was generally more up-to-date than the old village had been.